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Chapter 17: G-d

Osho,Does psychological therapy help to go beyond the mind?

Psychological therapy can help you to understand the mind, but it cannot lead you beyond the mind.

Only one thing leads you beyond the mind and that is meditation. Meditation has nothing to do with psychotherapy, but psychotherapy can create a ground by giving you a better understanding of your mind to go into meditation. It cannot lead you directly into the transcendental, but it can be a help, just the way you prepare a garden. First, you prepare the soil, but that is not the garden. And just preparing the ground, removing the weeds, the grass, any wild growth, stones, roots, still it is not the garden - this much psychotherapy can do.

Now you will have to put seeds, give nourishment to those seeds, care and love and protection. And slowly, slowly the bare ground will start becoming greener. One day there will be flowers and fruits.

Psychotherapy is only a cleansing process, but it is like all cleansing processes. You have to clean your house every day; it is not as if once you have cleaned it you have cleaned it forever. Within twenty-four hours again dust gathers. You have to take a bath every day, or twice; otherwise you will start getting dirty.

Psychotherapy is good as a cleaning method, but it does not go beyond that. And if you remain addicted to psychotherapies you will have to clean yourself again and again. You will have a better understanding of the mind but just that much is not enough to create the world of the beyond. For that, seeds of meditation, awareness, watchfulness are absolutely necessary.

And once you have gone beyond the mind, psychotherapy becomes meaningless. Going beyond the mind simply means you have realized your own being. Now mind is left far behind. Going beyond the mind also means that now mind is going to function as a servant and you are the master. So whenever you need to, you can use it. Right now the situation is just the reverse. You are not the master, and the mind uses you. The mind is almost blind and it directs your life and sooner or later you are going to fall into a ditch. All minds lead finally to misery, to suffering.

Meditation is the only possibility for creating a space where blessings shower.

I am not against psychotherapies. I am simply telling you they can be used as a foothold to jump into meditation. You can jump into meditation directly too, but you will find it a little difficult because you don’t have a clean mind and a clean understanding. The mind will put every weight on you and drag you backwards. Psychotherapy is instrumental, helpful, but alone it is meaningless. I am using psychotherapy in this commune as a means towards meditation, as a help, as a preparation.